Too Powerful to Be Used

McNamara urges less reliance on nuclear weapons

The article was clearly timed for maximum effect. One week after the resumption of the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) talks in Geneva and three weeks before the renewal of START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks), Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, dropped a bombshell of his own. In the fall issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, published last week, McNamara urged NATO to renounce its current reliance on the threat to use nuclear weapons, which he said are "totally useless" and "serve no military purpose."

Using strategic nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union would be "an act of suicide," McNamara wrote, because it would touch off a chain reaction of escalating nuclear exchanges. The likelihood of annihilation makes "first use"—the option of initiating the use of nuclear weapons to repel a Soviet conventional attack—at best a weak stick. "The threat of [first use] has lost all credibility as a deterrent to Soviet conventional aggression," he wrote. "One cannot build a credible deterrent on an incredible action."

By rejecting "first use," McNamara discarded a major element of the "flexible response" strategy, which he helped to design, and which was adopted as official NATO policy in 1967. In a Foreign Affairs article last year, McNamara and three other former architects of U.S. foreign policy (McGeorge Bundy, National Security Adviser to Kennedy and Johnson; George F. Kennan, former Ambassador to the Soviet Union; Gerard Smith, the chief negotiator of SALT I) stirred wide controversy in Europe by arguing that the concept of "first use" was antiquated and dangerous.

At a press briefing last week, McNamara said the U.S. should adopt a doctrine of "no first use until." Until what? Said he: "Until we know exactly what our opponent intended to do, at what level the order to use nuclear weapons originated on his side, and whether there is any chance that the conflict might still be confined without our resorting to nuclear retaliation." McNamara also recommended a major buildup of NATO'S conventional defenses to raise the "threshold" at which a conflict would "go nuclear"; the creation of a "nuclear-free zone" on either side of the Iron Curtain; and the removal of about 3,000 of the roughly 6,000 U.S. nuclear weapons stationed in Europe. A similar approach was urged by a number of allied defense officials at a closed-door meeting in Brussels earlier this year; they suggested a pullback of about 2,000 tactical weapons (artillery shells, mines and short-range missiles) from the front lines to meet the concerns of Western Europe's antimissile deployment movement.

McNamara added force to his argument with a provocative historical revelation. In private conversations with Kennedy and Johnson, McNamara says he recommended that they never "under any circumstances" use nuclear weapons. "I believe they accepted my recommendation," he wrote. According to McNamara, Kennedy never considered using nuclear weapons during the Berlin crisis in 1961 or the Cuban missile showdown in 1962.